Table Manners with Jessie and Lennie Ware - S9 Ep 25: George Alagiah

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

This week's guest has topped the leaderboard for mum and what a pleasure it was to have the charming & delightful George Alagiah on Table Manners. Zooming in from Hackney, the long standing BBC broadcaster, journalist and best-selling author tells us about his upbringing in Ghana, his experiences of being a foreign correspondent, interviewing Nelson Mandela & his love for writing thrillers!We hear all about George’s Nando's order, his mum's Sri Lankan cooking & how he learnt his Table Manners from his aunt Greta. What a joy! x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to Table Manners. I'm Jessie Ware and we're still Zooming with my mum. Hi mum. Hi darling, how are you? I'm alright. I'm looking forward to this guest tonight. Me too. You will know this broadcaster if you have watched the BBC News at Six at some point in the last 13 years. It's George Alagaya. Woo! last 13 years. It's George Alagaya. So George has also had a bestseller

and critically acclaimed novel called The Burning Land. And it was his first novel that he did and it came out last year and it's now on paperback. It's a thriller. It's right up your street. Do you know I've not been reading

through lockdown, so maybe I'll give this a go. Oh, I like this. This is the line at the beginning. It was never meant to be like this. Sabotage, yes. Propaganda, yes. All of that and more, but not this.

Not murder. Ooh, I'm in! George, you got me! Jeremy Vine calls it pacey and stylish. Much like George, handsome. George is a dish. Jessie, and do you know what? He's met my hero.

Who, Nelson? Nelson Mandela. So we're going to speak to George Alagaya about being born in Sri Lanka, growing up in Ghana, and then being the presenter of the... Everything that's happened since. Sam, are you telling me to be quiet? Yeah, sorry.

I was a bit enthusiastic about George Alagaya one second. I'm getting in trouble. Fucking lockdown. Well, tonight on table manners podcast we have the wonderful george alagaya oh wow and here he is tuning in i bet he's got a proper microphone oh he's got your microphone oh this is very uh thrilling hold on i feel like we should have some music going because george is connecting to it's like the crowd go wild. We want George. We want George. We can just see the microphone.

Oh, there he is. Hello. Oh, gorgeous. Yeah, that's the voice I recognise. Hi. Alice, is this a good time to hit the red dot? Okay, here we go. Yeah, that's working.

George Alagaya, welcome to Table Manners. How are you doing? I'm doing very well, thanks, Jessie. You're in East London, aren't you? Hackney. Yeah, I hear you've been there for quite a while. We moved to Stoke Newington, which is the bit of Hackney we're in, back in 1988 when it wasn't quite so sort of gentrified,

if I can put it that way. I can remember people saying, Stokeoke Newton, what are you doing there? And of course now, I mean, if you look at our two sons, couldn't afford to live here. And in fact, wouldn't want to live here because they think it's all gone a bit tame. I mean, I used to live in Hackney. I was in Dalston, but I did frequent Church Street.

And I'm not going to lie, it was kind of slightly, I was slightly embarrassed how much I enjoyed it because there are some quite good little spots. Oh, it's lovely. Yeah. You've just got to get over that. I mean, and we just, we can always say, you see, oh, well, we knew it when it wasn't like this.

So we've got bragging rights around here. But you've got great restaurants there. There are. Yeah. I dread to think what's happening to them at the moment. Most of them are doing, well, a few of them are doing kind of takeaways. Yeah. And veggies.

Yeah, veggies. And you know what? Like Countdown, not Countdown, Lockdown. Yeah, we are counting down, George. Most of us, I think, have got into this habit of having at least one day with takeaway food, which is, I think, keeping these places going. So, yeah, we just go up and down the street and get a takeaway from a different restaurant every Friday.

Do you ever go to Esther's? Yes, our favourite place. That is the one, oh my goodness. Favourite place for breakfast. I'm surprised I never saw you there. Oh, it's the best breakfast in London, I think. It's absolutely, I, see, what's going to happen to a place like that? Because, you know, you remember, I mean, mean it was tiny it was as big as this room and yeah we used to get about

sort of 20 people in there um they got a little bit of a courtyard garden which I've never seen them use um and they're presumably going to have to do something like that but quite how it's going to work out after lockdown oh wow but yeah yeah I absolutely love them so this podcast is about food and yes you you were born in that yeah I let's talk about this then so you were born in Sri Lanka I was so I was five years old when we left my family left Sri Lanka we're Tamils and you know as you probably know Sri Lanka was torn apart by a civil war and so on but long before the violence started lots of tamils began to understand that there was going to be discrimination and that they weren't going to fare well so in fact my father i think i'm right in saying was the first

kind of public sector worker in what was then called the public works department to kind of resign on this issue i mean he was they passed a law which made it very, very clear that Tamils, and in his case, an engineer, wasn't really going to progress. And so he was out of town, actually. He was up in the north of the country. He just drove straight back. And it is his resignation with no job to go, five kids. My mother thought he was mad and well and then he got a job in Ghana in West Africa which is where

I went to primary school but on the cooking side of it obviously we carried on eating I mean my mum like a lot of Asian women of her generation that was the thing she did so although Sri Lanka just represents a tiny portion of my life in terms of living there it's kind of culture especially its culinary culture stayed with us for decades and decades because my mum would do the cooking and I mean I still have visions of her actually and in fact one of her sisters had come to London. And you can imagine this. We had a sort of small terraced house in East Finchley. And she had a grinding stone. And the two sisters absolutely yakety yakety yak, you know. But one of them grinding, the other one pouring in the whatever,

the coriander seeds or the chili or whatever. And they used to do it the proper way. Why did they choose Ghana to go to? They didn't have a huge choice. I mean, you know, he needed to get a job. He couldn't do it in Sri Lanka. And Ghana was the first country in Africa to get its independence from the British. So as the British left, Ghana suddenly needed teachers, engineers, doctors, and so on and my father was a civil engineer so the new Ghanaian government this is 1961 sent a recruiting mission and on our plane I remember the flight you know we'd never been on a plane obviously and in those days the journey to Ghana took about three days

but on that same flight there were there were two other tamil families both of them engineers there's a massive brain drain um of tamils who just didn't think for their children there was going to be any prospect of their children getting on in life and did you live in quite a nice area was it we didn't live in any of the posh areas but you know my father was a public sector worker there were you influenced by the ghanaian food i think you, we didn't cook it. And the person who got most of it, actually, my younger sister, I think, was about maybe 18 months or something when we went to Ghana. But she had this very close relationship with our house worker,

a guy called Charles. And I remember them kind of sitting in the yard, you know, sort of their feet touching as if we're both, you know, their legs splayed out. And Charles having gone to a local shop or something and bought what's called kenke, which is a, I think it's a millet-based doughy thing, a bit like mashed potato, but firmer with a chilli kind of relish. And the two, this Charles, who would have been in his maybe 20 or something,

Two, this child who would have been in his maybe 20 or something. And my sister, who by the two, three years are sitting there dipping the kenke into the relish and, you know, all hands. In your area, were there lots of other Asian families that had moved into there? In Ghana, do you mean? Yeah. Well, there were not lots, but we tended to mix with Sri Lankan families.

And we didn't really have any white friends or my parents didn't have any. There were in the school I went to, it was a Ghanaian school. When I look at class photos, there were a couple of Asian kids, you know, like me. There was maybe two white kids and the rest of them were were Ghanaians and I mean I always remember you know when white people came to our house as they occasionally did very rarely actually but you know like the whole house was on kind of tenterhooks and all the best stuff got brought out and and I can remember there was a Scottish couple actually in fact we call them Auntie Greta and Uncle Richard and Auntie Greta is still alive in a home in Boston. I mean, they were, they really, really kind of adopted us. And I can remember Auntie Greta

teaching us how to hold a knife and fork and all that. Because obviously, you know, up to that point, we'd eaten with our hands. You know, even to this day, if we really get a good curry, then you'll see my sisters and we meet, you know, well, before lockdown, we met more or less once a week or something. But if one of them had cooked a really good curry, then you knew it was a good curry when somebody just plunged their hand in instead of, you know, dabbling around with a fork or something like that. Somebody would say, no, no, no, I've got to use my fingers for this. So have the siblings inherited your mum's skills at cooking well the interesting thing about

that yes basically I was the only boy that I had four sisters two older two younger four sisters four sisters four bossy women around you poor George well they were I think I was privileged actually I mean my two older sisters kind of looked after me and the two younger ones looked up to me. But I think it shaped me. You know, I'm so glad I had all those sisters. I mean, they're my best friends, remain my best friends. So on the cooking side, I think my mum will have consciously talked to my sisters about cooking and so on.

What's interesting, and I never had that being the boy, but what's interesting is later in life when we all had our own homes and so on and started cooking, I realised there was all this stuff in my memory bank because, interesting, when we got married, I mean, I'm married to a white English woman. I don't know how you describe it so she's as english as they come you know from sussex and her dad was a lawyer and my mum sat down there very carefully we still got this greasy recipe book and you know obviously dictated all

these recipes for chicken curry and cabbage malung and carrot sambal and stuff and and franny my my wife had sort of diligently written it all down and when she tried to cook it and which she can cook curries very well but in the early years i realized i had a just by looking at it i had this memory bank and i'd say do you know what i think when my mom did it it looked a little bit more ready or or the texture was a bit firmer or whatever. So I had that. And still to this day, if we're cooking curry, then I tend to do the chicken curry, say, then I'll cook that.

Stoke Newington's got some good curry spots, right? Yeah. Rasa's quite, I used to really like Rasa. Rasa's still great. Rasa's still brilliant. He's got Das who runs it, you know. I mean, he's incredibly entrepreneurial. And, you know, he started off, I think it was called Spices or something.

In the late 80s, early 90s, there was a restaurant, an Indian restaurant called Spices, and he was a chef or something in there. Then he set up on his own as Rasa. And we still use the get our dosa from Rasa's. Yeah. Masala dosa, you know, with that lovely spicy mashed potato inside and a takali curry.

Takali means tomato. And we get that takeaway quite frequently. And of course we've got a Nando's, but Stoke Newington being Stoke Newington, there was a big fight about whether Nando's should come in or not, you know, might sort of lower the tone. And I'm so glad Nando's won because I love it.

I love a Nando's. What's your order? I go for medium. I don't go for the full spice, partly because of sort of health reasons. I can't do spices, really spicy food anyway. But when we lived in South Africa, I was the BBC's man in Johannesburg.

And we had both our boys there, obviously much younger. And Nando's is actually a South African firm. Yeah. Yes. So it was a treat. You know, it's all the boys, you know, everyone feeling a bit lazy on a Friday night. Off we'd go to Nando's on Jan Smuts Avenue or something down in Joburg, downtown Joburg. And so it was fantastic when it arrived in Stoke Newington.

One little serious point about Nando's. Yeah. I think this is all right to say because you know how, you know, we all keep telling ourselves how multicultural we all are. But Stoke Newington's become kind of, Church Street has become kind of less and less of that, you know, as people like me move in, I mean, sort of wealthier people. But Nando's is still the only place where you can get, where you do see a really mixed crowd.

And I like it for that, actually, because the rest of it are all a little independent, this and that. Did you live in Joburg then, not Cape Town? Yeah, in Joburg. Like every correspondent, you know, you get to Joburg and you make your first trip to Cape Town and you start writing emails back to your bosses saying, do you know what? I think we'd be much, much better served if the BBC Africa Bureau were down in Cape Town.

But no, it was Joburg. What was Joburg like? When were you there? So we were there from the Mandela years, really. That's why I went. So he became president in 94. So 94 to 98, we were there. And it was an amazing time, actually.

I mean, this icon suddenly gets elected, leads this country. It was then, in the R years, still full of kind of optimism. It was the Rainbow Nation. Was it 1995? They even won the World Cup, you know, the rugby and Nelson Mandela wore the Springbok shirt with the captain's number on it and so on. And we just remember it being a lovely time. And for the family, too, actually, because one one of the things big differences when we went out there we decided that fran who at that time was a speech therapist she decided she wasn't going to work i mean we just thought you know we're away from home two

kids we need to kind of settle them in and she did sort of odds and sods but never really worked and and the difference was that my income which wasn't huge but was kind of enough you know we to rent our house and so on and it just was the most amazing period in terms of family life i mean i was away a lot i did a lot of traveling and and some ghastly stuff i mean you know liberian civil war um i remember at the time having to go up there and sort of it was always a kind of like a bit of a shock to come back to family life but when i wasn't traveling when i wasn't going to those sorts of places congo and things like that life of a of a bureau correspondent is you know you have a bag packed and you don't ask any questions when they say go you go but the rest of the time your editors kind

of leave you alone you know and so from that point when I was in Joburg, you know, I could spend a lot of time with our boys, with Fran, and we enjoyed ourselves. And how many times did you, or did you just see Nelson Mandela all the time? No, you didn't. I mean, you know, the whole world and his auntie kind of wanted to see Nelson Mandela. Yeah. And unless he was a spy skills or something who seemed to be able to see him whenever they wanted to. Oh, Naomi Campbell. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, interesting. There's a theme there with Nelson Mandela. Yeah. He liked beautiful girls. Oh, he loved, well, I think in the nicest possible way, he loved women, actually. And as a bloke, as a reporter, you just you just you know because he'd have this twinkle in his eyes and he'd flirt away with with with the female reporters but so I forgot the question

you're asking me did you ever speak to him yes I did yeah I so I interviewed I was lucky I I think a couple of one-on-ones with him and there were a few other occasions but actually interviewing nelson mandela wasn't an easy thing to do because you could never get beyond this kind of barrier that he had he always spoke as the leader of his people so you wanted to sort of find out you know what it was like in the prison years you know he'd written about it and one could guess stuff to do with his family and there was always a barrier and I always wondered whether that was a kind of protection actually because over the years as more people have found out about his life and what happened to his family and so

on while he was in prison all those years 27 years there was a lot of suffering around and I think he's alluded to feeling guilty so he wasn't a great interview interviewee in that sense i mean fantastic on the politics on reconciliation what he was doing for his country but anything personal was was pretty tough to get out of him one of the things i mean several things i remember about nelson mandela because one of the things he said was you know i don't hate the people i hate the system i mean he distinguished i mean you know he mean, it seems the most trite thing to say about him, but, but colour, the colour of one's skin wouldn't have entered his head. It was, it was, you know, how you behaved. And the other thing I remember actually more than anything else

that he said, and then in a way, this is a personal reflection. I remember asking him, if he'd learnt anything in prison kind of thing. And he said, in prison, I learnt to, if he'd learnt anything in prison kind of thing. And he said, in prison, I learnt to, let me get this right, in prison, I learnt to think through my brain and not through my blood. That's a good thing. You know, in other words, to think calmly, to analyse things. Because as a young man, I mean, we forget, you know. He was a hothead, yeah.

He was a hothead, exactly. And he was the one, in fact, I think, you know, the ANC used to kind of deploy when they wanted to go disrupt Communist Party meetings, which at that time, the Communist Party was sort of, was really in the lead in terms of fighting apartheid. I mean, we're going back to the 50s and 60s here. Sorry, not so much 60s, but certainly the 50s and perhaps before.

And he was the hothead. And, you know, the person who came out was this person who had learned to think, as he put it, through his brain. George, can I just ask you, you have the most wonderful voice without any trace of an accent. Now, how does a boy from Sri Lanka who lived in Ghana end up with the most perfect received English? Lenny, it's such a good questionny it's such a good question it's such a good question and my sisters speak like this we didn't go to posh schools I went to what was in those days called a direct grant so it was sort of like a grammar it was you had to pass an exam to get in and then the bit that was fee paying was the boarding bit there were about 100 boarders mostly a lot of kids

from the forces and so on but my friends and I still in touch regularly with two of my classmates as schoolmates and they don't talk like that and I think the only explanation I can give you is that you know for me I came here as an 11 year old child in literally in my first couple of days this thing called skin color and i didn't know i was black or brown or anything but in those days we used to have communal showers in school and i just got teased and taunted about my color and you know i mean there's a whole story about that. But I think somewhere in the immigrant, there is let me, you know, sink or swim. And I told myself, well, I wasn't going to sink. I didn't have a choice, actually. I was on my own in a boarding school.

I left a family in Ghana where there were kind of banana trees, guava trees, pineapple bushes in our garden, suddenly to a kind of a school playground, which is all tarmac, you know. And I had to fit in. And somewhere, what I was going to say is, I think in that immigrant mind, you maybe choose subliminally, unconsciously, the things that will get you,

that allow you to fit in, to fit in, basically. And remember, this is 1967. This was before we'd heard of the word multiculturalism. This is before there was a national narrative that supported people like me. And I think from memory, the Race Relations Act was about, the first one was about 19, anyway, somewhere mid-1960s. So if there wasn't one around around it had only just been passed

i mean you know this portrait in those days is naval city it's it's uh changed a lot but you know i can remember being chased by by skinheads you know shouting at my white friends what are you doing with a you know etc etc so i can only think that as i say you you find a way to fit in and in my case this accent certainly was I think what was one answer to that and the interesting thing about this accent is that there was racism in Britain then and there is racism in in Britain now but there's also this is a country where class plays a huge part and for years and years I carried on having a Sri Lankan passport even when I first joined the working for the BBC and you know we'd get back to Heathrow from whatever assignment we'd been to and obviously my crew were all English and white and they'd go off on you know just

zoom through immigration I'd be queuing up with the Algerians and the Bangladeshis and everything all of us getting very nervous and you get get to the immigration desk, and it was just so interesting because all I – and this is before, by the way, people kind of knew who I was. I'm talking sort of very early 90s when, you know, I hadn't made a name for myself in broadcast journalism. But all I had to say was, hello, and something clicked in. Welcome back, sir.

Kind of thing. You see, Jesse, it's how you speak. If you speak properly, you're going to go far. You know, so I think there was a sort of class thing. There was a class thing played in because they're suddenly thinking, oh, God, well, he doesn't sound like all the other people in the queue. You know, he's kind of one of us. You know, so there you go. I wanted to ask you, you've got two sons, have you? And I believe you've got a grand... Is it a granddaughter?

Yes. They're good granddaughters, aren't they? You can spend the rest of the time talking about it, if you like. Yeah, OK. I'll get my pictures out too. I mean, how old is she? And do you spoil her like my mother spoils my grandchildren with loads of sugar? Well, not yet, actually. She's 19 months, so we haven't got into the...

Oh, really? Because my son's 15 months and my mum's giving him chocolate. I didn't give him chocolate. Lenny, Lenny. I didn't. My daughter said he had one piece, mum, and she had loads.

One button. So that is inexcusable. That's just not the truth. I give her a pan of chocolate. See, that's as bad, Jessie. Why does that sound better, though? Oh, because it's French, Jessie. Why does that sound better, though? Oh, because it's French, Jessie.

Did you... Because the chocolate's hidden. Bouton au chocolat, and you wouldn't have minded. Well, you know, lockdown has been one of the... Lots of reasons why lockdown has been uncomfortable and not very nice, but the really tough one was not seeing her. I mean, we used to look after... Fran and I looked after her every Wednesday, and on Mondays, one of us would pick her up early and just and look and look at just for a couple of hours all of that obviously had to stop they couldn't come to our house we couldn't go to

their flat i think in the whole of the three months until a few saturdays ago when they could you know come through the house and be in the garden i think in all that three months we kind of well obviously did the whole daily facetime kind of chats but otherwise i think there were a couple of times where we kind of bumped into each other in the in the park and and kind of did the sort of socially distanced walk um but it was very difficult because she would come towards us and we'd we'd back you know, because you were not allowed to touch them. I know. And in the end, we just thought it just wasn't worth it. But you'd had COVID.

I had, but you can still be a vector. I mean, I could have touched something, you know, just on the walk, you know, and carried it. Yeah. George, did it affect your cancer treatments at all? No. So at that stage, let me get this right so for about 18 months up to very recently for about 18 months I'd been on a thing called maintenance chemo so I mean

I've not stopped treatment for the last six plus years I mean I must have I mean I've had dozens and dozens and dozens of chemo and we were going for a family wedding we'd planned to go to california for a family wedding and i asked my oncologist to stop the treatment sometime around then so i think i was i was on this maintenance chemo which wasn't very powerful i i got i got my symptoms were on something like march 17th or something just just before lockdown and i think i'd probably i coincided with my last bit of maintenance treatment because i said to him i don't want to take any for a month because i want to get fit and feel good to go to california and i want to drink the wine and you know etc etc um so i wasn't

actually being treated i've just come off treatment or maybe i just had one more to go or something like one more cycle or something to go so i was lucky in that way because I do some work with Bowel Cancer UK. And I know through them that lots of people had their treatment, especially surgery, delayed. And surgery is important, you know, because if you've got metastases, if your cancer has spread as mine had, I mean, I was stage four, so it doesn't get any worse than that. And mine had gone to the liver. mine had i mean i was stage four so it doesn't get any worse than that and mine had gone to the liver well if you're going to operate you need to there's this there can be quite an urgency because you really don't want to just spread any further within that organ because you might get to a point

where actually you can't do the operation so for lots of cancer patients people living with cancer lockdown it's been a very very difficult time luckily for me it wasn't you know there's huge anxiety you can imagine anywhere around around COVID-19 and then you're thinking you know when will my treatment start when will the surgery start and so on uh it's it's a tough time yeah I'm back on kind of what I call grown-up chemo so it in fact I go tomorrow morning for and it's start of three days and you know that's that me out for a week are you working at the moment i did so it's a two-week cycle and as i say the first week i mean i you know i have three days of chemo and all you know all the stuff about you've heard about chemo as there's no way i could work i mean you're just so so fatigued and then the second week i sort of pick up onto the day

six or seven I start picking up and the BBC's been absolutely fantastic and I've gone into work in that second week I'm now coming up to my fourth round in this cycle and I'll just have to wait and see you know whether work is possible because it's a cumulative thing the stuff sits in your body and it builds up and that's the whole point of it really so you get to the point where there's lots of the stuff in you and it just becomes harder and harder and i've i've been on this road before i mean back way back in in 2014 i was an even stronger treatment i mean i can't i don't know how i got through it actually when i think back at it than i am on now um so we'll see um george i wanted to ask have been writing? Because I read that you wanted to write a novel based in Sri Lanka, set in Sri Lanka.

I do. Or are you kind of waiting to just do that and enjoying the fact that your book is out on paperback now? Yeah. No, I haven't started writing it. I've certainly started thinking about what my next project should be. And, you know, the thing about the job i do which i i love you know it's immediate it's um it's important we've discovered just how important it is over the last three four months people have turned to the bbc and they're millions it's still the place they go to because they trust they trust what we do but it is sort of what i you know that's my kind of job thing

there's a creative side if you like it and I mean one of the great things about I mean I've got to hear the burning land writing fiction is that people say why are you doing fiction well the thing about fiction is that for me journalism is about facts and fiction is about truth oh why do you say that in in journalism event a happened followed by event b and person c said this and you say that? lust it's about prejudice it's about hope it's about aspiration those things that are very hard to talk about in journalism and you can in fiction you can get inside people's motivations and so on and you know in journalism there is a limit to it and i think you fiction takes you beyond that as i say into into motivation motivations and although in one sense the burning land is a very topical issue it's it's about the race for land it's about rich countries buying land in poor countries some people are calling it new colonialism it's about corruption

it's about the rich taking things away from the poor that's the backdrop but within that i hope anybody who reads the burning land will see in it these the idea of how how people how a country that was born after a centuries-old battle for a kind of freedom should have people who behave in this way. So where's it set, George? It's set in South Africa. Oh, South Africa. Oh, fantastic. I didn't know you'd written a book, but Jesse said, Jesse read what it was about, and it just sounds like a cup of tea. It's a thriller. Yeah, it is a thriller. If you like thrillers, you'll... Love thrillers. They can make it's a thriller yeah it is a thriller um if you like thrillers you'll love thrillers they can make it into a bbc drama george can you go and talk to someone about it

jesse have you not sold it god they need a few new ideas i'm telling you there is a there is a production company that have got it at the moment and are thinking about it but they need to find money and nobody's you know there aren't any kind of proper meetings and things going on i don't think at the moment but uh the interesting thing is as i wrote it i wrote it in pictures i kind of saw these pictures in my head scenes and people said was it hard to write i mean the plotting of it was hard the characterization was hard but the writing of it when i got down to those things was relatively easy because i was just kind of seeing this image in my head this picture and I was just kind of racing to describe what was happening in that in that picture so I saw it in a very visual way fantastic George before you have chemo and you know you're going to feel shit for a couple of weeks do you have a kind of well I'm going to

have a really nice meal before I go well actually that's why I haven't got a huge amount of time because that's exactly yeah that's what you want you're gonna have a special dinner so what's what are you having tonight i don't know i'm gonna france go to have it i know one of the things she's going to do yesterday we uh i can't remember busy so we went to one of our favorite places sweet thursday to get i've heard that amazing pizza. What is Sweet Thursday? It's an amazing pizza place in De Beauvoir, which is not in France. It's kind of down the road. Yeah, I know.

So we had that. But everybody sort of has a habit of leaving the crust. So you end up with everybody eating in the middle and all of the crust around it sitting there. The crust the crust not good enough then do they need to work on their crust i love the crust i love crust but um we were having a socially distant thing in the garden and one of my sons they all seem to leave it and i said what are we going to do is i can't believe we're going to throw this away and one of my sons matty who had traveled in lebanon the middle east and so on um said why don't you make fatouche so you baked it i think fran is is going no you fry it apparently

fry it fry it in really good good Yeah. And just season it. But you make a salad, raw onion, tomato, greens, throw in some... Parsley. Parsley, exactly. And then apparently, then you do the frying so that you then toss it into the... They're meant to be pita bread, but we're using pizza crust. You throw in at the last moment when it's still warm

and off we go. That's a that's a sustainable lockdown tip what's that thing you called a life hack is that what you call a life hack that's a life okay that's a life hack what what what what's that word yeah you i didn't know what they were a life hack is like something that you do to solve something which will be like whether you put an elastic band. If you can't fit your jeans together with the button, you put an elastic band around it so it will fit. So how do you spell that? Life hack? It's a hack, like a journalist, like, you know, hack and a life hack.

And you've just supplied possibly the best life hack that table manners has ever had. George, before you go, there's some really important questions we have to ask you. Your desert island meal, starter, main, pudding and drink of choice. Right. A drink of choice would be a nice, cool Sancerre, a French white, I think. It makes me sound really posh, actually, but, you know, anyway, because I don't know a huge amount about it, but I do know... God, if you're going on a desert island for a few months, you can have a Sancerre.

But the problem with that, because that's... I really like the wine, but you can't have it with a curry. Oh. Why couldn't... Really? No, no, it just kills the wine. Have that first then before with your appetizers. Exactly. Lenny, you're on my wavelength, so you'd have the wine first.

You're having two drinks, it's fine. Then I'd probably like, I mean, I'm not into, I mean, Tamil food is like red, red hot. I mean, I don't know how, I don't know why all these Sri Lankans, well, actually not Tamil food, Sri Lankans, I don't know why they don't know why all these sri lankans well actually not i don't not tamil food sri lankans i don't know why they haven't all got sort of stomach ulcers and things um so i wouldn't have it very hot i'd go for a a sodi um which s-o-d-h-i which is almost like a sort of a fish soup but with kind of boiled egg in it. It's a yellow turmeric-y colour. And the consistency is slightly soup. And you'd have it with, I mean, you could have it with bread,

but I'd probably have it with pitu, which is a steamed rice flour dish. And it just soaks up all that soly, all that lovely, lovely stuff. So I'd probably just have that. And, well, the greens, you know, it could be anything. I'd like a good salad i mean i know it's not part of the curry thing but you know why not you know it's desert island i'm on my own i can do what i want can't i sure what are you drinking with it now now i'd have beer beer okay now which beer goes best with the curry well i think it's just as long as it's a lager

you just want something that cuts through well i don't drink anymore because it makes me feel so ill with the chemo. But when I do, I like a good pale ale or something, you know. But that's more subtle and you need to enjoy it, you know. I think you're using the lager, really cold, ice-cold lager, just to kind of cut through. Okay. Yeah. All right.

Pudding. Pudding. I tell you what I do. What? I like a lemon posset. I understand that. Oh. I understand that.

I mean, it's lovely. I made them. Do you remember, Jessie? That's bloody good. You said it was really good. Heavenly. Dead easy, isn't it? Yeah, dead easy.

I've never made it. Actually, Fran makes it all the time. She knows I love it. So easy. So I'd probably go for that. And then just because I'm on a desert island, obviously it's tropical and there's loads of fruit and everything there. Oh, yeah, you'd be all right.

I'd have some, you know, kind of some mango or something just to kind of, you know, I'd probably do that actually. I'll tell you what, I'll do that in between the courses just to wash, cleanse the palate. Very nice. Yeah, I'd have a bit of mango maybe before the main meal. In fact, you know what? Fran, we used to, especially when the kids were here,

we always had our fruit before the meal because my wife's kind of into biome and you should be interviewing her really because she knows a lot more about food and tables. She's really into sort of those kinds of things and and i don't know what the science is but apparently it's better to have your fruit before you have the other stuff so better for digestion or something right apparently i think so yeah i think so have you got good table manners george jesse what are you saying listen to the the voice. Thanks to Auntie Scottish Auntie.

What's her name? Auntie. Auntie Greta. Auntie Greta taught you everything you know. But we've abandoned all that. I mean, for me, a table is a place where there's groaning with food. There's a multi-generational group of people around it. And table manners go out of the window and you just reach out and grab

whatever you want and it just keeps coming and so on so no i'm not a big one for for table manners you know you've got you've got to enjoy the company i mean it's it's food and and people for me go together i always find when we travel you know there's only so much of kind of like the museum and the art gallery and the, you know, ruined, sort of centuries old ruined buildings. That's the food. I have to find out where local people are going, sit at a table and just kind of watch all that lovely stuff. Because food in our culture is a central, really, really important part of it. in our culture is a central really really important part of it i mean my mother cooked with a care and an attention and an affection that that i remember tangibly you know it's something i remember now and and for me the thing that's going to happen when we finally get rid of

this lockdown thing is we're going to have all my sisters we'll probably come to our house because we've got the biggest garden and we just have sweet chaos around the table that's what's going to happen that sounds beautiful and lastly karaoke song do you like it would you sing it what's your song well it would have to the thing i sing in the shower yeah is me and bobby mcgee oh wow you and me and bobby chris christopherson busted flat and baton rouge and heading for the train feeling nearly faded as my jeans bobby thumbed a diesel down so you me and bobby mcgee bravo george so i i do that in the shower so i guess that would have to be be the one george it's been such a pleasure so wonderful um good luck with the chemo uh in the next three days and it's just been so fascinating chatting to you about all your stories

and the burning land is out on paperback now it came out out last year, hardback, and now it's out in paper form. Well, it was slightly, I think I'm told today, it's been out of stock in Amazon, but I'm told today, I got an email saying. Muzzle tough. Yeah, so you can, and I think Waterstones were out of stock, but I think I heard that they've got it as well. Oh, great. We'll definitely get it.

George, such a pleasure. Enjoy your meal. Thank you. And I'll remember that I've learned life hack. Oh, my God, I love George Alagaya. That voice, Jessie. It was like velvet. That face, that voice, those stories. He was gorgeous. I loved that episode. I loved his stories. I loved speaking to him. He's fascinating.

Do you know what? He was also very polite and warm and like, oh yeah, that's a good point. Oh don't, that made me feel so special when you said that was a great question that you asked. Yeah. Just so lovely. He was one of the best we've had on. He's going to be my new favourite. Thank you so much, George Alagaya. I really love you. I loved you before and I always loved the Six O'Clock News. However, I've melted after that conversation. He's a real heartthrob.

He's the George Clooney of the BBC News. I'm going to get his book because I'm sure if he, he will tell a good story I can tell. And it must be really interesting. You're a reporter, you're a newsreader, you work for the BBC, you have to be non-partial. So I'm really interested to see the passion that comes out in this fictitious novel thriller. I'm sure there's some hidden stories in there that he was never allowed to tell. Fiction is about the truth. Love that. Thank you, George Alagaya. We love you. The rest of the UK loves you too.

Good luck with all the treatment. Yeah, and good luck sending you loads of love. Everyone who has been interested by this novel, The Burning Land, it's out on paperback now. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your continued support during this lockdown. We can't wait to cook for people again and see people in the flesh who knows we could be going into someone's garden soon that would be lovely The music you've heard on Table Manners is by Peter Duffy and Pete Fraser. Table Manners is produced by Alice Williams.